Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
Tell me about PF2E for Sandboxing
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8190868" data-attributes="member: 6801252"><p>So you have a few major advantages with sand-boxing in Pathfinder 2e, I'm a GM who does only homebrew (with a very little bit of PFS during a con being the only exception) and I've been using the system just about weekly since launch.</p><p></p><p>1. Exploration mode provides a super good built in procedure for sandbox play, allowing you to crawl large dungeons and areas of wilderness. It sets expectations for tracking time and codifies a system of activities for your players to use (without precluding additional ones) while they move through the environment in minimum increments of 10 minutes. It functions like a marching order where each member of the party gets to take on roles, ranging from searching for traps and secrets, watching out for danger, studying the environment for lore, sneaking, and so forth. It creates a more elaborate game play space than other modern games does with exploration.</p><p></p><p>2. The encounter guidelines function with a high degree of accuracy, there's no real need to push the players through x number of encounters to exhaust their resources, severe fights are hard even if the party is fully rested (though a prepared party going nova can still mitigate this to an extent.) This means giving the party control of the pacing of their adventures doesn't have major problems. It also provides a relatively simple gauge for how difficult an encounter will actually be, allowing you build them in a modular manner, and track how hard they'll be if they combine/split apart. Adventures and adventuring areas are actually really easy to create, and the monsters in this game are really fun in their own right because they have cool abilities, you also have an ever expanding supply of cool monsters, traps, and magic items to design with.</p><p></p><p>3. Crafting doesn't break the game open, though its usefulness is game dependent-- its more useful in my game where access to high level settlements, or high level magic items in low level settlements, isn't a given. Magic Items similarly won't break the game open, and with the variant rule, you could easily run high treasure, or low treasure without any problems. Coming from 5e, a flaming sword here is much less problematic for your player to have, which means they feel freer to actually have it. This will make your sandbox much less breakable regardless of what your players do.</p><p></p><p>4. Downtime mode is nicely fleshed out, letting you engage in activities that earn income, retrain your abilities, and do other stuff (some of which is class or archetype specific) when you're not adventuring, in a well balanced system. This is important in a sandbox where the players might decide to pursue their own goals in town, either waiting for something specific to happen, or to try and gather resources and prepare for their next adventure. There are rules for settlement stat blocks that can flesh out the game world, and subsystems for everything from infiltration to research, they're all based off a mechanic called 'victory points' that make them easy to learn, but each is a little different.</p><p></p><p>5. Experience is a flat curve, and the game sets out different levels of 'accomplishment' exp that should make it easy to track their progress without having to constantly adjust your amounts to keep up with an inflating target, while still rewarding them when they aren't fighting.</p><p></p><p>6. Finally, the large array of options, common and uncommon seem nice for a sandbox world because players can be more invested in their own growth. Rarity allows you to designate some things off limits because they wouldn't mesh with your game style, or even just ot hold them back as rewards for engaging with the world-- e.g. to get a certain archetype you have to join a certain organization, or whatever. I'm considering removing bags of holding in an upcoming pirate west marches because I want transporting the treasure, in general, and in safety, to be a present theme, as they plan their voyages to their destination and back to a friendly port on a hexmap. </p><p></p><p>Then you have one kind of big problem:</p><p></p><p>1. Level is added to most of the numbers, things more than 4 levels above, or lower than 4 levels below, are numerically outside your players strike zone (the things below will go down like wet paper and not have any real chance of hitting, the things above will nuke them quite unfairly) and those encounter guidelines I mentioned are heavily based on the level of the monsters relative to the party. This does create a scenario where areas of your world will be straight up too dangerous to go to until they level up, or will be too weak to bother with. Depending on your approach this could actually be a good thing, if its well communicated the players can set long term goals to revisit an area or something and make the world feel more alive as it isn't scaling with them (they'll feel growth because it'll let them do things they literally couldn't before) but some people dislike there being any limitation on 'we want to go here and explore this.'</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="The-Magic-Sword, post: 8190868, member: 6801252"] So you have a few major advantages with sand-boxing in Pathfinder 2e, I'm a GM who does only homebrew (with a very little bit of PFS during a con being the only exception) and I've been using the system just about weekly since launch. 1. Exploration mode provides a super good built in procedure for sandbox play, allowing you to crawl large dungeons and areas of wilderness. It sets expectations for tracking time and codifies a system of activities for your players to use (without precluding additional ones) while they move through the environment in minimum increments of 10 minutes. It functions like a marching order where each member of the party gets to take on roles, ranging from searching for traps and secrets, watching out for danger, studying the environment for lore, sneaking, and so forth. It creates a more elaborate game play space than other modern games does with exploration. 2. The encounter guidelines function with a high degree of accuracy, there's no real need to push the players through x number of encounters to exhaust their resources, severe fights are hard even if the party is fully rested (though a prepared party going nova can still mitigate this to an extent.) This means giving the party control of the pacing of their adventures doesn't have major problems. It also provides a relatively simple gauge for how difficult an encounter will actually be, allowing you build them in a modular manner, and track how hard they'll be if they combine/split apart. Adventures and adventuring areas are actually really easy to create, and the monsters in this game are really fun in their own right because they have cool abilities, you also have an ever expanding supply of cool monsters, traps, and magic items to design with. 3. Crafting doesn't break the game open, though its usefulness is game dependent-- its more useful in my game where access to high level settlements, or high level magic items in low level settlements, isn't a given. Magic Items similarly won't break the game open, and with the variant rule, you could easily run high treasure, or low treasure without any problems. Coming from 5e, a flaming sword here is much less problematic for your player to have, which means they feel freer to actually have it. This will make your sandbox much less breakable regardless of what your players do. 4. Downtime mode is nicely fleshed out, letting you engage in activities that earn income, retrain your abilities, and do other stuff (some of which is class or archetype specific) when you're not adventuring, in a well balanced system. This is important in a sandbox where the players might decide to pursue their own goals in town, either waiting for something specific to happen, or to try and gather resources and prepare for their next adventure. There are rules for settlement stat blocks that can flesh out the game world, and subsystems for everything from infiltration to research, they're all based off a mechanic called 'victory points' that make them easy to learn, but each is a little different. 5. Experience is a flat curve, and the game sets out different levels of 'accomplishment' exp that should make it easy to track their progress without having to constantly adjust your amounts to keep up with an inflating target, while still rewarding them when they aren't fighting. 6. Finally, the large array of options, common and uncommon seem nice for a sandbox world because players can be more invested in their own growth. Rarity allows you to designate some things off limits because they wouldn't mesh with your game style, or even just ot hold them back as rewards for engaging with the world-- e.g. to get a certain archetype you have to join a certain organization, or whatever. I'm considering removing bags of holding in an upcoming pirate west marches because I want transporting the treasure, in general, and in safety, to be a present theme, as they plan their voyages to their destination and back to a friendly port on a hexmap. Then you have one kind of big problem: 1. Level is added to most of the numbers, things more than 4 levels above, or lower than 4 levels below, are numerically outside your players strike zone (the things below will go down like wet paper and not have any real chance of hitting, the things above will nuke them quite unfairly) and those encounter guidelines I mentioned are heavily based on the level of the monsters relative to the party. This does create a scenario where areas of your world will be straight up too dangerous to go to until they level up, or will be too weak to bother with. Depending on your approach this could actually be a good thing, if its well communicated the players can set long term goals to revisit an area or something and make the world feel more alive as it isn't scaling with them (they'll feel growth because it'll let them do things they literally couldn't before) but some people dislike there being any limitation on 'we want to go here and explore this.' [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
Tell me about PF2E for Sandboxing
Top